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Increasing demands from the enterprise are putting tremendous pressure on the network infrastructure. John McHugh, Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Brocade Communications, talks to Varun Aggarwal about how Campus LAN can resolve these challenges.
What has been driving you to invest into the campus LAN area?
Arguably theres been a dearth of innovation in campus LANs. This has led to networks that are complex, operationally intensive and expensive to manage. Additionally the Campus LAN is beginning to stretch at the seams due to the impact of some mega trends.
The combination of Campus LAN complexity and these mega trends necessitates an architectural shift in the way campus LANs are designed.
A survey by InfoPro of Fortune 1000 enterprise network administrators revealed The top pain points for companies operating campus LANs: Keeping up with technology, capacity planning, reliability / performance and managing growth.
This echoes the sentiment we often hear from network administrators; namely their networks cost too much to operate, are becoming increasingly complex to manage, and applications and more importantly users periodically suffer from unpredictable performance and network downtime.
There is really only one way to overcome these challenges: innovation.
These pain points and lack of innovation have led to skyrocketing costs associated with running, maintaining and scaling a campus LAN. In fact, Gartner estimates that companies spend about 17% of their total IT budget, both CapEx and OpEx, on their networks.
In 2011, more than half of these operating expenses went towards simply maintaining the campus LAN.
The problem is that as the networking environment has become increasingly distributed and technology in the data center and user devices levels evolved more quickly than the campus LAN, so the traditional campus LAN architecture is struggling to keep pace.
What do you consider as the major developments in the campus LAN domain?
If we look back at innovations in the campus LAN over that timeframe, we can point to two major developments: unified communications and the wireless LAN. But given the advancements over the same period of time in technologies that touch the campus LAN, this is hardly sufficient.
Further, campus LAN equipment incumbent vendors at the high and low end of the market also bear much responsibility for the lack of innovation. They have answered customers needs with boxes that increased speeds and feeds as opposed to solutions that address the growing complexity and requirements of the network.
These vendors have often fiercely protected their installed base and legacy product lines rather than offering true innovation for new challenges.
This lack of innovation and inability to address customers fundamental Campus LAN pain points is becoming particularly acute today because we are beginning to see a confluence of major trends that will drive and dramatically change campus LAN requirements for the next decade and beyond.
These trends range from the exploding number and variety of bring-your-own devices that IT must contend with, to the exponential bandwidth requirements of high-definition video and the soaring growth in video-based applications.
Further, I know weve all been talking about virtual desktop infrastructure for a long timebut the reality is, it is becoming an issue that youll need to confront in the very near future. And its going to add tremendous complexity to your infrastructure.
The great news is that these trends represent opportunities to organisations that are prepared for them, including creating competitive advantage, accelerating time-to-market, improving productivity and collaboration and increasing profitability.
How can the campus LAN add to innovation?
The place to start is with innovation in the campus LAN to accommodate the increasingly demanding requirements and optimise the user experience.
IT thus becomes a strategic competitive asset, and a critical business resource within the organisation. That is tremendously empowering if you are prepared.
In the last quarter of 2011, Apple and Samsung alone shipped an incredible 72 million smart phones. In 2012, the IT industry will ship one billion devices in a single year.
In terms of enterprise mobility, BYOD will add billions of mobile devices to your networks over the next few years. This will add all kinds of management, security, policy and other IT challenges to your campus LAN operations.
BYOD is so big, there are actually more people who own a mobile phone than own a toothbrush. Now lets turn to another significant mega trend -- video. We all realise that the impact of video-based traffic on the network is massive.
How massive would be the impact?
Estimates are that by 2014, 91 percent of all internet traffic will have some component of video to it TV, video on demand, streaming, peer-to-peer video.
It goes without saying that this represents a major shift in architectural requirements of the network in terms of bandwidth, security, reliability, and network latency, just to name a few.
Another mega trend Ill talk about is virtual desktop infrastructure. While theres been a lot of hype around VDI, Gartner estimates that over the next two years, VDI will become a finally become a reality, resulting in a 10 x increase in the adoption of virtual desktops in enterprises. That represents growth from 5 million, which is almost nothing, to 50 million!
10-15 percent of all end points in a campus LAN will be virtualised. Campus LANs will still include hardwired PCs and servers in abundance, but more and more, we are moving to a virtual desktop world where reliability and high-performance networks will be key in delivering the proper level of services, uptime and maintenance to support widely varying workloads.
Whats more, the trends that Ive just mentioned are just the things we can see on the horizon today. Ten years ago, who would have believed that we would see such an explosion in mobile devices that could and would need to interact with critical corporate applications? Who would have expected the creation and rapid adoption of video applications like streaming content and HD video conferencing that put an exponential increase in demands on the campus LAN?
What role is Brocade playing in helping enterprises meet these growing demands?
The increasing consumerisation of IT is requiring that you be ready to accommodate new technologies that you may not even be able to anticipate today.
Technology is moving very rapidly and if history has taught us one thing its that building a campus LAN to meet todays requirements and tomorrows, is a moving target.
And that leads us to Brocades Effortless Network. A new campus LAN architectural comprised of innovations in campus networking that will enable customers to address the challenges theyre facing in evolving their networks for emerging applications and services such as the consumer-driven endpoints, the explosion of video and desktop virtualisation.
With this innovation, you can manage the entire lifecycle of your access switching layer with a single management IP address, treating the edge of your network like a single device. Thats in sharp contrast to todays network where you have to manage device-by-device or one single stack at a time. For example, you can roll out a new access control policy to address a security concern, or new QoS policy for a new real-time application, to all end user ports in the campus with a single CLI command, eliminating the need to touch each device or individual stack.
What is the win for your IT organisation? First, you will reduce administrative costs by eliminating configuration steps; Second, you will improve compliance by ensuring consistency of configurations among all access layer ports; And, finally, you will increase network availability by reducing human configuration errors, which remain the number one cause of network downtime.
Single-point management will be delivered on Brocade edge switches via a simple software upgrade. With our key innovation of HyperEdge: mix-and-match stacking, you can create a stack consisting of low-cost access switches that deliver basic features and connectivity, and combine them with premium access switches in the same stack to deliver more advanced features and services to all ports within the stack.
With this, first, you can create stacks that are far less expensive than todays offerings. Competitor stacking approaches require that all members of the stack be the same, meaning all members of the stack must be premium switches to deliver premium services, and this adds significant cost to the stack. When compared to solutions from other vendors, Brocades solution will typically be at least 50% less expensive.
Second, you can build basic, low-cost stacks now that are services-ready. You can add premium switches to the stack at any time to enable new services and features for the entire stock. In contrast, competitor approaches require a rip-and-replace of the entire stack to add premium services.
This level of stacking flexibility, low cost and investment protection is absolutely unique in the industry.
(Courtesy: CTO Forum)
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